Egg donation is the reason fertility travel exists at the scale it does. It is the treatment most often banned, capped or rationed at home, and the one where the medical case for a young donor is strongest precisely when your own odds are lowest. It is also where the differences between countries stop being cosmetic: who may donate, who may receive, what it costs and what your child may one day learn all change at the border.
Why donor eggs change the odds
The European registry numbers are unambiguous. ESHRE’s monitoring of ART in Europe reports fresh donor-egg transfers achieving about 50.5% pregnancy per transfer in 2019 and 51.3% in 2020, versus roughly 33 to 35% for transfers using the patient’s own eggs. Frozen donor oocytes land slightly lower, around 44.8 to 45.7% (ESHRE EIM, ART in Europe 2019/2020).
Two honest caveats belong next to those numbers. First, they are pregnancy rates per transfer, not live births; live-birth figures run lower in every category. Second, the advantage comes from the donor’s youth, not from donation as a technique. A 30-year-old patient gains little from donor eggs. A 43-year-old, whose own per-retrieval live-birth odds have fallen to single digits (see the age table), is looking at the single largest improvement available in fertility medicine.
What donor-egg IVF costs by country
The figures below are advertised clinic prices, triangulated across aggregators rather than taken from any single clinic, and they are estimates, not quotes. Medication is usually extra (typically €1,000 to €1,500, range €800 to €2,500), and so are PGT-A and any frozen transfer.
| Country | Donor-egg cycle (advertised) | Anonymity | Who can receive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | €5,900–€11,000 | Anonymous (Law 14/2006) | Couples, single women, female couples |
| Czech Republic | €4,500–€8,000 | Anonymous | Heterosexual couples only |
| Greece | €5,000–€8,000 | Mixed (anonymous or ID-release at 18) | Couples and single women |
| Portugal | €6,000–€8,000 | Identity-release at 18 (CNPMA) | Couples, single women, female couples |
| United Kingdom | ~€10,500 | Identity-release at 18 (since 2005) | Couples, single women, female couples |
| United States | €20,000–€50,000 | By arrangement (agency model) | Broad access; donor fee alone $8,000–$20,000 |
Advertised, aggregator-triangulated figures, verified June 2026; not government or insurer data. Treat as planning ranges.
The anonymity decision: what your child can ever know
Price gets the attention, but anonymity is the decision that lasts a lifetime, and it is set by law, not by the clinic. Three regimes cover the main destinations:
- Strictly anonymous: Spain (Law 14/2006) and the Czech Republic. The donor’s identity is sealed; your child will not be able to trace her through the clinic, ever.
- Identity-release: Portugal (regulator CNPMA, records kept 75 years) and the UK (all donors registered since April 2005). The child can request the donor’s identity at 18; the first UK requests landed in 2023.
- Mixed: Greece allows anonymous, known, or identity-release-at-18 donation, chosen at the time of treatment.
Neither model is "better", but they answer different futures: anonymity offers the recipient certainty, identity-release offers the child an answer. Consumer DNA testing has also made absolute anonymity harder to guarantee in practice than the law implies. Decide this deliberately, before you shortlist a country, not after a price comparison has decided it for you.
Who is eligible where
Donor-egg eligibility follows the same lines as IVF eligibility in general, covered in detail in the single women and same-sex couples guides. In short: Spain and Portugal treat heterosexual couples, single women and female couples alike. Greece adds single women but not female couples as a couple. The Czech Republic remains heterosexual-couples-only. Turkey bans all third-party reproduction outright and since March 2010 has prohibited residents from travelling abroad for donor conception, the strictest rule anywhere in this comparison (Gürtin, RBMO 2011). Poland limits treatment to heterosexual couples and adds a rule worth knowing before you freeze embryos there: surplus embryos must eventually be donated to another couple, regardless of your wishes.
What the advertised price actually includes
A typical donor-egg package covers the donor’s screening and stimulation, egg retrieval, fertilisation and one fresh transfer. The main extras to budget: your medication (usually €1,000 to €1,500), ICSI where not bundled (€500 to €1,500), PGT-A if wanted, and a frozen transfer if the fresh one does not succeed, which is billed as its own cycle. The logistics are also lighter than an own-egg cycle abroad: the donor does the stimulation in-country, so most recipients need fewer or shorter trips. The full trip-by-trip picture is in how IVF tourism works.
Run your own situation through the Eligibility + Cost Finder first: it filters out the countries whose law would turn you away, then puts honest ranges on the rest.